no title

Early voters celebrate as balloting begins

Dozens on hand as Franklin County opens voting center

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoTom Dodge | DispatchPeople line up outside the Franklin County voting site at the former Kohl’s store at 1700 Morse Rd. in anticipation of the start of early voting.

Your Right to Know

Franklin County’s early voting center opened its doors this morning to a vocal crowd who treated
the first day of voting as a party.

About 50 people were lined up along the entrance, counting down the minutes before the center
opened. Many were Ohio State students — and Obama supporters — who camped outside of the voting
site at the former Kohl’s store at 1700 Morse Rd. on the North Side.

As they walked inside center, they shouted cheers “Ready to vote” and “Four more years.”

“We’re tired, but we’re excited,” said freshman Angelica Pastrana, 18. She and a friend spent
the night at a nearby YMCA because of last night’s rainy weather.

“We’re dedicated, but we don’t want to get sick,” she said.

After months of nonstop campaigning and TV commercials, the election of 2012 started to count at
the ballot box today.

Early in-person voting started in each of Ohio’s 88 counties at 8 a.m. while the first of more
than 922,000 absentee ballots will begin to be mailed today by county boards of elections.

The campaign also is launching a “Commit to Mitt Early Vote Express” statewide bus tour. And a
30-city tour by Voters First Ohio — seeking to revamp the way Ohio draws congressional- and
legislative-district boundaries — was to start at the old Kohl’s at 9 this morning, though no bus
had shown up as of 9:30 a.m.

Such festivities are a sign of how early voting has grown in popularity since “ no-fault”
absentee voting was instituted in 2005, with nearly 30 percent of the votes in the 2008
presidential election cast before the polls opened on Election Day. Some officials say it could be
40 percent or more this year.

There’s a lot at stake with early voting, particularly among Democrats seeking to pump up
turnout to return Barack Obama to the White House amid the heated contest with Republican Mitt
Romney for must-win Ohio.

Early voters tend to vote Democratic, while Election Day sees more Republicans travel to the
polls, according to a study by the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of
Akron.

Ohio’s about 922,000 absentee-ballot requests already is more than halfway to the total ballots
that were returned in the entire 2008 election.

Secretary of State Jon Husted reported yesterday that 922,199 Ohioans, including 124,342 in
Franklin County, had requested ballots as of Friday, with requests continuing to pour in after
statewide mailings to voters.

Requests for absentee ballots are down by 6,004, or about 5 percent, compared with the same time
in 2008, according to the Franklin County Board of Elections. Obama won Franklin County in 2008
with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Husted proclaimed “everything in Ohio is ready to go” as voters begin to cast their ballots for
president, Congress, legislative and local races, in addition to 1,794 local tax and other
issues.

Ohio has 7.8 million registered voters ahead of next Tuesday’s deadline to register to vote in
the Nov. 6 election, Husted said.

The total is down about 400,000 because of an effort to purge voter-registration rolls of those
who have died, moved out of state or list multiple home addresses, he said. Ohio’s voter rolls, he
said, “are in the best shape they’ve ever been.”

Nearly 70 percent of Ohioans voted in the 2008 presidential election, and Husted said he has
seen no evidence to suggest that number will markedly increase or decrease this year.

Hours for in-person voting on the three days just before Election Day still have not been set in
central Ohio counties. Husted said a directive on weekend voting to county boards of elections will
be “forthcoming.”

A federal judge ruled that a state law prohibiting weekend voting was unconstitutional in a
lawsuit filed by the Obama campaign. The decision is being appealed to a federal appellate
court.